Philip French's classic DVD + Thriller | The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/series/philip-french-classic-dvd+thriller
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Pickup on South Street review – a masterly film noirhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/23/pickup-on-south-street-dvd-review-samuel-fuller-philip-french
(Samuel Fuller, 1953; Eureka!, PG, DVD/Blu-ray)<p>A hard-nosed tabloid newsman in New York before scripting B-movies in Hollywood in the 1930s, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002087/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm" title="">Samuel Fuller</a> served as a much decorated infantry sergeant in North Africa and Europe during the second world war. He returned to the cinema after the war, becoming a writer-director-producer, starting with <em>I Shot Jesse James</em>, a low-budget western questioning the nature of courage and hero worship. War movies, noir thrillers and westerns were his forte, action films of visual power that combined nuanced social commentary with brutal directness. They confused middle-class critics the world over into thinking Fuller was a rightwing thug rather than a sensitive artist who sympathised with outsiders, losers and men in the street.</p><p><em>Pickup on South Street</em> was made at 20th Century Fox under the sympathetic eye of producer Darryl F Zanuck during Fuller’s only time as a well-paid contract director. It’s a masterly film noir, released at the height of the red-baiting McCarthy era. In the brilliant opening sequence, set on a packed, sweaty Manhattan subway, a flashy woman (Jean Peters) has her wallet lifted by a pickpocket (Richard Widmark) as two middle-class men look on.</p><p>Fuller famously turned down Ava Gardner, Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe as too glamorous for the role of the hooker</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/23/pickup-on-south-street-dvd-review-samuel-fuller-philip-french">Continue reading...</a>DVD and video reviewsFilmCultureThrillerSun, 23 Aug 2015 07:00:15 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/23/pickup-on-south-street-dvd-review-samuel-fuller-philip-frenchPhotograph: Allstar/Cinetext/20th Century FoxPhotograph: Allstar/Cinetext/20th Century FoxPhilip French2015-08-23T07:00:15ZThe Offence review – Connery and Lumet’s starkly naturalistic police dramahttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/14/the-offence-sidney-lumet-dvd-review-sean-connery
(Sidney Lumet, 1972; Eureka!, 15)<p>By the mid-1960s Sean Connery had completed his contract with Saltzman and Broccoli and feared being typecast as 007. So to lure him back to appear in a sixth Bond film (<em>Diamonds Are Forever</em>, 1971), United Artists promised him $2m to make two movies of his own choice. The first he picked was <em>This Story of Yours</em>, a grim police procedural based on a play by <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/may/01/broadcasting.tvandradio">John Hopkins</a>, one of the writing team on <em>Z-Cars</em>, the realistic BBC TV series that had transformed the image of the British , taking him out of Dock Green and dropping him in a depraved new world. Hopkins’s reputation was running high at the time. His quartet of TV plays, <em>Talking to a Stranger</em>, was widely regarded as the best work written to date for the small screen, and <em>This Story of Yours</em> was put on at the Royal Court under Harold Pinter’s auspices. With the title changed to <em>The Offence</em>, copper. Connery discarded his toupee (but kept his licence to kill hidden in his wallet) to play the bitter, hard-drinking Detective Sergeant Johnson, a middle-aged plainclothesman on the edge of madness after two decades investigating rape, murder and child molestation on an anonymous Home Counties estate.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/14/the-offence-sidney-lumet-dvd-review-sean-connery">Continue reading...</a>Sean ConnerySidney LumetDVD and video reviewsThrillerFilmCultureSun, 14 Jun 2015 07:00:05 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/14/the-offence-sidney-lumet-dvd-review-sean-conneryPhotograph: /www.ronaldgrantarchive.comSean Connery as the ‘explosive, guilt-ridden’ Detective Sergeant Johnson in The Offence. Photograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.comPhotograph: /www.ronaldgrantarchive.comSean Connery as the ‘explosive, guilt-ridden’ Detective Sergeant Johnson in The Offence. Photograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.comPhilip French2015-06-14T07:00:05ZThe Train review – it’s Lancaster v Scofield in this French Resistance thrillerhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/07/the-train-john-frankenheimer-dvd-review-philip-french-burt-lancaster
(John Frankenheimer, 1964; Arrow, PG)<p>This long, exciting second world war thriller (based on a true-life incident involving art conservationist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Valland">Rose Villard</a>, who appears briefly in its opening sequence) has particular present-day relevance in view of the mindless destruction of art works and ancient ruins by Islamic State and our responses to these iconoclastic barbarities. <em>The Train</em> centres on the efforts of the French Resistance railway workers led by Paris regional manager Paul Labiche (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/feb/17/1">Burt Lancaster</a>) to prevent a trainload of priceless modern French paintings from being shipped to Germany in August 1944 before the liberation of Paris. In what was only the third of his major screen roles, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/mar/20/2">Paul Scofield</a> is hypnotic as the Nazi art connoisseur Colonel Franz von Waldheim, who conceals his obsession with preserving these works by insisting on their value to the Third Reich’s economy. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/nov/01/features.features11">Jeanne Moreau</a> appears as the widowed manager of a railway cafe, but there’s no romantic interest. It’s Waldheim against Labiche.</p><p>Lancaster mastered all the tasks connected with railroad engineering and performed most of his own demanding stunts</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/07/the-train-john-frankenheimer-dvd-review-philip-french-burt-lancaster">Continue reading...</a>ThrillerWar filmsDVD and video reviewsFilmCultureSun, 07 Jun 2015 07:00:04 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/07/the-train-john-frankenheimer-dvd-review-philip-french-burt-lancasterPhotograph: United Artists/Allstar/UNITED ARTISTSBurt Lancaster and Paul Scofield in The Train. Photograph: United Artists/Allstar/UNITED ARTISTSPhotograph: United Artists/Allstar/UNITED ARTISTSBurt Lancaster and Paul Scofield in The Train. Photograph: United Artists/Allstar/UNITED ARTISTSPhilip French2015-06-07T07:00:04ZThe Manchurian Candidate review – Philip French on John Frankenheimer’s near-perfect conspiracy thrillerhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/08/the-manchurian-candidate-dvd-review-philip-french-near-perfect
(John Frankenheimer, 1962; Arrow, 15)<p>In a brilliant opening sequence set in 1952, an American patrol in the Korean war is abducted by Soviet agents, flown to Manchuria, brainwashed and returned to the American lines. They’re convinced their charmless platoon sergeant (Laurence Harvey) is a hero who has saved their lives. In fact he’s been turned into a Soviet mole within the American establishment, ready to become an assassin at the sight of a coded queen in a pack of cards. Adapted by playwright <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/jun/24/guardianobituaries.film">George Axelrod</a> (author of the hit comedy <em>The Seven Year Itch</em>) from an ingenious, deadpan novel by Richard Condon, <em>The Manchurian Candidate</em> is astutely directed by <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/jul/08/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries">John Frankenheimer</a>, a sharp, fast-thinking film-maker recently recruited from live TV drama.</p><p>In creating the continuing vogue for the paranoid political conspiracy thriller, the movie combines the surreal (in its depiction of brainwashing), the documentary in the presentation of the way TV was coming to dominate American life, and ruthless black comedy in mocking both McCarthyism and the cold war. Two of the most memorable jokes take stabs at both sides. A right-wing senator is trying to remember how many clandestine communists he’s claiming there are in the government, and Frankenheimer cuts from a bottle of Heinz ketchup to the dim-witted politician claiming that “there are exactly 57 card-carrying members of the Communist party in the department of defence”. Later, a somewhat sanctimonious, lily-white liberal senator is assassinated as he stands beside a fridge, a torrent of milk spurting from the carton the bullet penetrates on its way to his heart.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/08/the-manchurian-candidate-dvd-review-philip-french-near-perfect">Continue reading...</a>DVD and video reviewsFilmCultureAngela LansburyStanley KubrickThrillerSun, 08 Mar 2015 08:00:13 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/08/the-manchurian-candidate-dvd-review-philip-french-near-perfectPhotograph: United Artists/Allstar/UNITED ARTISTSFrank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate. Photograph: United Artists/Allstar/UNITED ARTISTSPhotograph: United Artists/Allstar/UNITED ARTISTSFrank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate. Photograph: United Artists/Allstar/UNITED ARTISTSPhilip French2015-03-08T08:00:13ZThe Killers review – Philip French on Robert Siodmak’s first-rate Hemingway adaptationhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/14/the-killers-robert-siodmak-dvd-philip-french-classic-burt-lancaster-ava-gardner
(Robert Siodmak, 1946; Arrow, PG)<p>Published in 1927, Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers<em> </em>is one of the great short stories of the 20th century. In a taut 3,000 words it recounts a visit to a small town outside Chicago by two laconic, wisecracking hit men, Max and Al, who take over a local diner one late afternoon to kill a regular patron, a down-and-out ex-boxer known as the Swede. When he doesn’t turn up they leave. Hemingway’s fictive alter ego, Nick Adams, is in the diner, and he goes to warn the Swede, who lies passive in his rooming house, making no effort to escape. Edward Hopper wrote to the publishers in 1927 to say he found it “refreshing to come upon such an honest piece of writing in an American magazine”, and it inspired his painting <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nighthawks#mediaviewer/File:Nighthawks_by_Edward_Hopper_1942.jpg" title=""><em>Nighthawks</em></a>. The story’s influence ranges from Pinter’s <em>The Birthday Party </em>to Cronenberg’s <a href="http://" title=""><em>A History of Violence</em></a>, and there have been three film versions – this 1946 noir classic by Robert Siodmak, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZzRJ8gdDSE" title="">a 1956 film school exercise by Andrei Tarkovsky</a> and a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIHwpbdiskc" title="">1964 TV film by Don Siegel</a> – which are compared in a visual essay accompanying this Blu-ray disc.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/14/the-killers-robert-siodmak-dvd-philip-french-classic-burt-lancaster-ava-gardner">Continue reading...</a>DVD and video reviewsFilmCultureErnest HemingwayThrillerSun, 14 Dec 2014 08:00:07 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/14/the-killers-robert-siodmak-dvd-philip-french-classic-burt-lancaster-ava-gardnerPhotograph: /Allstar/UNIVERSAL‘Incendiary’: Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in The Killers. Photograph: Allstar/UNIVERSALPhotograph: /Allstar/UNIVERSAL‘Incendiary’: Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in The Killers. Photograph: Allstar/UNIVERSALPhilip French2014-12-14T08:00:07ZSpione review – Philip French on Fritz Lang’s groundbreaking spy thrillerhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/07/spione-review-fritz-lang-philip-french-classic-dvd
(Fritz Lang, 1928, Eureka!, PG)<p>Reeling from the box-office disaster of his monumental science-fiction movie <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/metropolis"><em>Metropolis</em></a>, Fritz Lang was still contracted to Berlin’s UFA studio, whose bosses now demanded a cheaper surefire success in the crowd-pleasing style of his early thrillers. The result was <em>Spione</em> (aka Spies), which circulated in severely truncated versions until 2006, when the German restorers drew on a variety of prints to bring it back to the original three-hour duration. Until then it was regarded as a minor work that Lang would invariably refer to as “a small film with a lot of action”. In fact, <em>Spione </em>weaves together recurrent Lang themes of fate, fear, power and paranoia into a dynamic conspiracy thriller that taps into the underlying tensions of Weimar Germany and presents the modern city as at once liberating and frightening.</p><p>The movie’s narrative origins reside in the Louis Feuillade French serials much admired by the surrealists and centres on the megalomaniac schemes of Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Lang’s regular villain in <em>Metropolis</em> and the <em>Dr Mabuse </em>films), a master criminal with many faces. He controls his empire from a wheelchair in a secret headquarters beneath a bank and anticipates both Bond’s enemies and Kubrick’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/dr-strangelove"><em>Dr Strangelove</em></a>. Haghi’s nemesis is the suave government secret agent No&nbsp;326 (debonair German matinee idol Willy Fritsch), who falls in love with the former Russian spy Sonja (Gerda Maurus), one of Haghi’s accomplices.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/07/spione-review-fritz-lang-philip-french-classic-dvd">Continue reading...</a>Fritz LangThrillerDVD and video reviewsFilmCultureSun, 07 Dec 2014 00:05:08 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/07/spione-review-fritz-lang-philip-french-classic-dvdPhotograph: /Everett Collection/REXSpione: 'taps into the underlying tensions of Weimar Germany.' Photograph: Everett Collection/REXPhotograph: /Everett Collection/REXSpione: 'taps into the underlying tensions of Weimar Germany.' Photograph: Everett Collection/REXPhilip French2014-12-07T00:05:08ZThe Day the Earth Caught Fire review – Philip French on Val Guest’s lively nuclear angst thrillerhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/16/the-day-the-earth-caught-fire-dvd-val-guest-philip-french
(Val Guest, 1961, BFI, 12, DVD/Blu-ray)<p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/may/16/guardianobituaries.obituaries">Val Guest</a> began his movie career in the 1930s writing scripts <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r3uVroqlMg">for the great Will Hay</a>, and made his last movie as writer-director reworking one of them as <em>The Boys in Blue</em> (1982) for the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-MvJhlv8CE">mirthless duo Cannon and Ball</a>. In between, he was a prolific journeyman, a handful of whose genre movies are worthy of revival, most notably the Hammer horror pictures <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlygJ9VfhVo"><em>The Quatermass Xperiment </em></a>and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Wu5ysngp_c"><em>Quatermass II </em></a><em> </em>and the thrillers <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9MEsqtj_e0"><em>Hell is a City</em></a>, <em>The Day the Earth Caught Fire </em>and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joHqR7g5pNs"><em>80,000 Suspects</em></a>, which achieve a certain authenticity through being shot in striking black-and-white CinemaScope on location in respectively Manchester, London and Bath.</p><p>The best is <em>The Day the Earth Caught Fire</em>, one of British cinema’s liveliest nuclear angst pictures, which unfolds in flashback from a world filmed through a golden filter to suggest it’s about to ignite. This terminal crisis results from our planet being put out of kilter by simultaneous H-bomb tests on both sides of the iron curtain. The film is both an engaging period piece, because it views the grim news from the Fleet Street office of the <em>Daily Express </em>(where the hacks bash away at manual typewriters), and topical because it anticipates global warming.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/16/the-day-the-earth-caught-fire-dvd-val-guest-philip-french">Continue reading...</a>DVD and video reviewsFilmCultureThrillerScience fiction and fantasySun, 16 Nov 2014 00:06:03 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/16/the-day-the-earth-caught-fire-dvd-val-guest-philip-frenchPhotograph: BRITISH LION/Allstar/Allstar/BRITISH LIONEdward Judd, Janet Munro and Leo McKern in The Day the Earth Caught Fire. Photograph: BRITISH LION/Allstar/Allstar/BRITISH LIONPhotograph: BRITISH LION/Allstar/Allstar/BRITISH LIONEdward Judd, Janet Munro and Leo McKern in The Day the Earth Caught Fire. Photograph: BRITISH LION/Allstar/Allstar/BRITISH LIONPhilip French2014-11-16T00:06:03ZThe Naked City review – Philip French on Jules Dassin’s curious police proceduralhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/09/naked-city-review-jules-dassin-police-procedural-philip-french-classic-dvd
(Jules Dassin, 1948; Arrow Academy, PG)<p>Made in the wake of the second world war, when mainstream Hollywood was absorbing the techniques of documentary and the lessons of Italian neorealism and producers were still happily employing openly leftwing film-makers, <em>The Naked City </em>is invariably identified as a classic. But if so, what sort of classic?</p><p>The thin story of a seasoned, philosophical homicide cop (Barry Fitzgerald) and his callow young partner (Don Taylor) pursuing a murder involving a gang of New York jewel thieves invites the categorisation of police procedural. Director <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/apr/02/obituaries.mainsection" title="">Jules Dassin</a> and screenwriter Albert Maltz were both blacklisted after defying the House Un-American Activities Committee, and while the film reflects Dassin’s unpatronising feeling for everyday New Yorkers and Maltz’s conviction that corruption reaches down from the city’s upper classes to the criminal underclass, the social criticism is rather mild. The movie was shot almost entirely on the streets of New York and takes its title from a collection of sensational photographs of crime scenes and bizarre street life by the cameraman who signed his work <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2012/jan/19/weegee-murder-photographs-pictures-new-york" title="">Weegee</a>. But it is little influenced by his rawness and only occasionally takes on the expressionistic manner and edgy psychopathology of the film noir with which Dassin and the movie’s producer Mark Hellinger have been associated.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/09/naked-city-review-jules-dassin-police-procedural-philip-french-classic-dvd">Continue reading...</a>ThrillerDVD and video reviewsFilmCultureSun, 09 Nov 2014 00:05:04 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/09/naked-city-review-jules-dassin-police-procedural-philip-french-classic-dvdPhotograph: Ronald Grant Archive'Some sort of masterpiece': Barry Fitzgerald, Don Taylor, Howard Duff and Dorothy Hart in The Naked City. Photograph: Ronald Grant ArchivePhotograph: Ronald Grant Archive'Some sort of masterpiece': Barry Fitzgerald, Don Taylor, Howard Duff and Dorothy Hart in The Naked City. Photograph: Ronald Grant ArchivePhilip French2014-11-09T00:05:04ZLe jour se lève review – Philip French on Marcel Carné’s poetic realist classichttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/02/le-jour-se-leve-review-marcel-carne-philip-french-dvd-classic
(Marcel Carné, 1939; StudioCanal, PG)<p> One of the peaks of “poetic realism”, the 1930s film school known for its combination of leftwing attitudes, visual and verbal lyricism and a pessimistic view of lower-class characters snared by a cruel fate, <em>Le jour se lève</em> (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031514/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt" title=""><em>Daybreak</em></a>) qualifies as what the French call <em>un film maudit</em>, a movie with a&nbsp;curse upon it. It opened on the eve of the second world war, was banned during the occupation and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039581/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" title="">remade in 1947</a> by RKO, who attempted to destroy all existing copies. In the 1950s the belligerent critics of <em>Cahiers du cinéma</em>, soon to be film-makers in the new wave, attempted to destroy the reputation of its director, Marcel Carné, accusing him of heavy-handedness and attributing all that is successful in <em>Le jour se lève</em> to his long-time collaborator, the poet Jacques Prévert.</p><p>Fortunately they failed, and now the films Carné made in the decade after he became a director in 1936 are considered key works of a golden age. Almost everything about <em>Le jour se lèv</em>e, now available in an immaculately restored version, seems the work of an assured master. France’s greatest movie actor, Jean Gabin, dominates the picture as a suburban foundry worker who in the opening minute kills his tormentor, a sadistic music-hall performer (Jules Berry), and then barricades himself in his seedy lodgings. Over the next night and day, as hostile police lay siege and sympathetic members of the public watch on, Gabin reviews his life in three extended flashbacks, most especially his relationships with a pretty flower girl (Jacqueline Laurent) and a cynical big-hearted demimondaine (Arletty), both victims of the suave, manipulative Berry.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/02/le-jour-se-leve-review-marcel-carne-philip-french-dvd-classic">Continue reading...</a>DVD and video reviewsFilmCultureThrillerSun, 02 Nov 2014 00:07:06 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/02/le-jour-se-leve-review-marcel-carne-philip-french-dvd-classicPhotograph: /Allstar/Cinetext/AFEOr the teddy bear gets it… Jean Gabin and Jacqueline Laurent in Marcel Carné's Le jour se lève. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/AFEPhotograph: /Allstar/Cinetext/AFEOr the teddy bear gets it… Jean Gabin and Jacqueline Laurent in Marcel Carné's Le jour se lève. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/AFEPhilip French2014-11-02T00:07:06ZL'Assassino – Philip French on Elio Petri's sophisticated political thrillerhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/03/lassassino-philip-french-elio-petri-sophisticated-thriller
(Elio Petri, 1961; Arrow, 12)<p>Following the decline of neorealism, the Italian cinema suddenly renewed itself both thematically and stylistically in the 1960s. The social criticism still came largely from the left, extending from the spaghetti western to satires on middle-class life like Pietro Germi's <em>Divorce Italian Style</em>, and chief among the influential new innovators were <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/federico-fellini?page=2" title="">Fellini</a>, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/michelangeloantonioni" title="">Antonioni</a>, Visconti, Rosi, Pasolini and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/bernardobertolucci" title="">Bertolucci</a>. From this list, the name of Elio Petri (1929-82) is too often missing nowadays. A working-class Roman intellectual, Petri wrote trenchant film criticism for the Communist paper <em>L'Unità </em>and realistic screenplays. After the Hungarian invasion, he quit the party and made his directorial debut in 1961, reconciling his Marxism and his desire to reach a popular audience. His aim was to combine sharp political commentary, technical sophistication and star performances, and this he achieved with the political thriller <em>L'Assassino</em>.</p><p>The Italian cinema's leading actor of the day, Marcello Mastroianni, gives a superb performance as Alfredo Martelli, an unscrupulous antiques dealer with a smart shop near the Spanish Steps, who one morning is picked up by some aggressive cops and accused of killing his wealthy sponsor and mistress (the beautiful Micheline Presle). Like a cross between JB Priestley's <em>An Inspector Calls</em> and Kafka's <em>The Trial</em>, <em>L'Assassino </em>sees Alfredo being broken down by the good-cop bad-cop interrogation approach over a harrowing day and night. Responding to their questions, Alfredo slides in and out of flashbacks (a cinematic style then unfamiliar), exposing his ethical shortcomings, guilt and revealing the bad faith underlying middle-class Italian life.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/03/lassassino-philip-french-elio-petri-sophisticated-thriller">Continue reading...</a>ThrillerDVD and video reviewsWorld cinemaFilmCultureSat, 02 Aug 2014 23:10:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/03/lassassino-philip-french-elio-petri-sophisticated-thrillerPhotograph: PRMarcello Mastroianni as an antiques dealer in trouble in L'Assassino.Photograph: PRMarcello Mastroianni as an antiques dealer in trouble in L'Assassino.Philip French2014-08-02T23:10:00ZAce in the Hole – Philip French on Billy Wilder's masterly newspaper film noirhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jun/08/ace-in-the-hole-dvd-philip-french-review
(Billy Wilder, 1951; Eureka!, PG)<p>Billy Wilder worked as a hard-nosed newspaperman on tabloids in Vienna and Berlin during the 1920s and brought this experience to bear on <em>Ace in the Hole</em>. Made immediately after the corrosive <em>Sunset Boulevard</em>, it was his first film as producer-director following the dissolution of his longtime partnership with the older, relatively conservative Charles Brackett, with whom he'd worked since arriving in California as an exile from Nazi Germany. Now regarded as an uncompromising masterpiece, it was a major box-office and critical failure in the States at the height of McCarthyism, despite a memorable performance by Kirk Douglas, who is at his most uningratiatingly forceful in virtually every scene.</p><p>Douglas plays Chuck Tatum, a flamboyant reporter fired from big city papers for his unscrupulous conduct, drinking and lechery, trying to make a comeback in small-town New Mexico, working for a dull, honest editor whose motto, embroidered on framed samplers in his office, is "Tell the Truth". After a year of $60-a-week tedium, Chuck suddenly finds his ace in the hole by exploiting the plight of a sad loser, Leo Mimosa, who's managing a run-down diner and filling station in the desert with his disillusioned young wife Lorraine (a tough, vulnerable Jan Sterling). Leo is trapped underground in an ancient Indian cave dwelling, and Chuck manipulates Lorraine and a local sheriff into helping him protract the rescue so he can transform the incident into a national news story that will attract sightseers and catapult him back into the big time. "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwTMJ3zNqdg" title="">I've met a lotta hard-boiled eggs in my life</a>, but you, you're 20 minutes," Lorraine tells Chuck, half admiringly.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jun/08/ace-in-the-hole-dvd-philip-french-review">Continue reading...</a>DVD and video reviewsFilmCultureBilly WilderKirk DouglasThrillerSat, 07 Jun 2014 23:06:06 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jun/08/ace-in-the-hole-dvd-philip-french-reviewPhotograph: Allstar/Cinetext/ParamountKirk Douglas ‘at his most uningratiatingly forceful’ in Ace in the Hole. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/ParamountPhotograph: Allstar/Cinetext/ParamountKirk Douglas ‘at his most uningratiatingly forceful’ in Ace in the Hole. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/ParamountPhilip French2014-06-07T23:06:06ZViolent Saturday – Philip French on Richard Fleischer's masterful tale of smalltown tensionhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/04/violent-saturday-richard-fleischer-philip-french-classic-dvd
(Richard Fleischer, 1955; Eureka!, 12)<p>Scripted by Sydney Boehm, a specialist in westerns and crime movies whose best film is perhaps Fritz Lang's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045555/?ref_=nm_knf_t1" title=""><em>The Big Heat</em></a>, and directed by genre specialist Richard Fleischer, <em>Violent Saturday </em>is a noir thriller in Technicolor that brings together in 90 minutes a key location of the 1940s and 50s with one of those decades' favourite plots.</p><p>The setting is a corrupt, middle-American township (key examples being <em>King's Row</em>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050839/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2" title=""><em>Peyton Place</em></a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052218/?ref_=nv_sr_1" title=""><em>Some Came Running</em></a>). The opposite of the cosy hometown of Andy Hardy movies and nostalgic Tin Pan Alley songs, it's seething with hypocrisy and inhabited by snobs, alcoholics, thieves, voyeurs, blackmailers, adulterers and womanising playboys. The plot is the heist movie, the&nbsp;story of a carefully prepared robbery, which has been around since <em>The Great Train Robbery </em>(1903) but became an established species of the crime genre in&nbsp;the postwar years in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042208/?ref_=nv_sr_1" title=""><em>The Asphalt Jungle</em></a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041268/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" title=""><em>Criss Cross</em></a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049406/?ref_=fn_al_tt_3" title=""><em>The Killing</em></a>.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/04/violent-saturday-richard-fleischer-philip-french-classic-dvd">Continue reading...</a>DVD and video reviewsFilmCultureThrillerCrimeSat, 03 May 2014 23:07:04 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/04/violent-saturday-richard-fleischer-philip-french-classic-dvdPhotograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar/20th Century FoxLee Marvin, J Carrol Naish, Victor Mature and Stephen McNally in the 'carefully orchestrated' Violent Saturday. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar/20th Century FoxPhotograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar/20th Century FoxLee Marvin, J Carrol Naish, Victor Mature and Stephen McNally in the 'carefully orchestrated' Violent Saturday. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar/20th Century FoxPhilip French2014-05-03T23:07:04ZSerpico DVD review – Philip French on one of New York's grittiest cop filmshttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/02/serpico-new-york-grittiest-cop-films
(Sidney Lumet, 1973; Eureka!, 18)<p>An enduringly entertaining thriller, <em>Serpico </em>is important in three related contexts. First, it belongs to a remarkable cycle of police pictures made in the&nbsp;turbulent last years of the Vietnam war. Influenced by the success of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066206/" title=""><em>Patton</em></a> and its ambivalent appeal to Vietnam hawks and doves, Hollywood jumped off the youth bandwagon and on to the police paddy wagon with pictures about maverick cops fighting a lonely battle on America's lawless streets.</p><p>The most controversial were films on the right – <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2011/jul/14/french-connection" title=""><em>The French Connection</em></a> and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/movie/97011/dirty-harry" title=""><em>Dirty Harry</em></a>. The most amenable to liberals was this true story of the quietly idealistic Frank Serpico, an Italian-American hippy type, bearded and hairy, who first attempts to find a modus vivendi in the endemically corrupt New York police before blowing the whistle and nearly paying with his life. One of the grittiest, least romantic movies ever shot in New York, it's incisively edited by Dede Allen, whose work ranges from <em>The Hustler</em> to <em>Reds</em>.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/02/serpico-new-york-grittiest-cop-films">Continue reading...</a>ThrillerSidney LumetAl PacinoDVD and video reviewsFilmCultureSun, 02 Mar 2014 00:05:11 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/02/serpico-new-york-grittiest-cop-filmsPhotograph: Ronald Grant ArchiveCornelia Sharpe and Al Pacino in Serpico: ‘among Sidney Lumet's finest’. Photograph: Ronald Grant ArchivePhotograph: Ronald Grant ArchiveCornelia Sharpe and Al Pacino in Serpico: ‘among Sidney Lumet's finest’. Photograph: Ronald Grant ArchivePhilip French2014-03-02T00:05:11ZThe Killershttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/23/killers-lee-marvin-ronald-reagan-dvd
(Don Siegel, 1964; Arrow Academy, 18)<br /><p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/ernesthemingway" title="">Hemingway</a>'s 1927 story <em>The Killers</em> is set one evening in a Chicago diner where two hitmen arrive to kill a washed-up boxer, Ole Andreson, who dines there regularly. This night he doesn't show, but when informed of their visit reveals neither surprise nor any intention of running. It's a lean, ironic, funny tale of fate, confronting death and grace under pressure that inspired Edward Hopper's painting <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/111628" title=""><em>Nighthawks</em></a> and was turned into <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/feb/17/thriller.features" title="">a classic 1946 film noir</a> that made a star of Burt Lancaster. John Huston co-wrote a screenplay in which an insurance investigator discovers why Andresen decided to die rather than flee.</p><p>Don Siegel's remake, the first film planned as a full-length TV movie, turned the doomed victim into racing driver Johnny North (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/johncassavetes" title="">John Cassavetes</a>), kept the&nbsp;basic plot of a heist gone wrong, but looked at the story from the viewpoint of ageing hitman Charlie Strom (Lee Marvin), who's eager to know why Johnny&nbsp;didn't attempt to escape, and his psychopathic, hero-worshiping assistant (Clu Gulager). From the opening scene in which they terrify the blind school where Johnny works, they're an unsympathetic pair, but utterly compelling in their ruthlessness. The movie defines the violent, complex persona that would make Marvin a star, and he's cast alongside the irresistibly alluring Angie Dickinson, anticipating the femme fatale&nbsp;role she plays opposite Marvin's remorseless avenger in John Boorman's <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/movie/36266/point-blank" title=""><em>Point Blank</em></a>.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/23/killers-lee-marvin-ronald-reagan-dvd">Continue reading...</a>DVD and video reviewsFilmThrillerDramaCultureSun, 23 Feb 2014 00:05:07 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/23/killers-lee-marvin-ronald-reagan-dvdPhotograph: Everett Collection/Rex'Femme fatale and remorseless avenger': Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin in The Killers. Photograph: Everett Collection/RexPhotograph: Everett Collection/Rex'Femme fatale and remorseless avenger': Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin in The Killers. Photograph: Everett Collection/RexPhilip French2014-02-23T00:05:07ZGaslighthttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/15/gaslight-thorold-dickinson-classic-dvd
(Thorold Dickinson, 1940, BFI, PG)<p>Although he only directed eight features, Thorold Dickinson (1903-84) had as remarkable and wide-ranging a career in the British cinema as his close contemporaries David Lean and Anthony Asquith. Like Lean, he served a long apprenticeship as an editor. Like Asquith, a fellow liberal, Oxford-educated son of the establishment, he had an early interest in the avant-garde and played a significant role in organising ACT, the film industry trade union.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/15/gaslight-thorold-dickinson-classic-dvd">Continue reading...</a>ThrillerDVD and video reviewsFilmCultureSun, 15 Dec 2013 00:05:12 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/15/gaslight-thorold-dickinson-classic-dvdPhotograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.comAnton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard in Thorold Dickinson's 'impeccable' version of Gaslight. Photograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.comPhotograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.comAnton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard in Thorold Dickinson's 'impeccable' version of Gaslight. Photograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.comPhilip French2013-12-15T00:05:12ZThe Furyhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/17/the-fury-brian-de-palma
(Brian De Palma, 1978; Arrow, 18)<p>Now 73, Brian De Palma was one of the bearded young, cinéliterate film-makers dubbed "the movie brats", who rose rapidly to dominate Hollywood in the 1970s. De Palma was Hitchcock's most assiduous disciple and <em>The Fury</em>, released in 1978, was part of his bid to establish himself as the Master's heir apparent. Like <em>The Man Who Knew Too Much</em>, <em>The Fury</em> yokes together a spy thriller and a domestic drama while also incorporating elements of SF and horror.</p><p>It begins with an electric sequence on a sunny east Mediterranean beach where widowed CIA agent Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas) narrowly escapes death when his teenage son Robin (Andrew Stevens) is abducted, apparently by Arab terrorists. It rapidly becomes clear that he's been kidnapped by Sandza's chillingly sinister colleague (John Cassavetes), who intends to exploit the boy's psychic gifts for nefarious cold war purposes. Douglas is at his most attractively anguished as he follows a trail to Chicago, where a teenage girl (Amy Irving) with kinetic powers provides an entree to a suspect research centre for ESP and paranormal psychology.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/17/the-fury-brian-de-palma">Continue reading...</a>Brian de PalmaKirk DouglasJohn CassavetesThrillerScience fiction and fantasyDVD and video reviewsFilmCultureSun, 17 Nov 2013 00:07:10 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/17/the-fury-brian-de-palmaPhotograph: Allstar/20TH CENTURY FOX/Sportsphoto Ltd./AllstarAndrew Stevens as Robin Sandza in Brian De Palma's The Fury (1978): 'a polished melodrama'. Photograph: AllstarPhotograph: Allstar/20TH CENTURY FOX/Sportsphoto Ltd./AllstarAndrew Stevens as Robin Sandza in Brian De Palma's The Fury (1978): 'a polished melodrama'. Photograph: AllstarPhilip French2013-11-17T00:07:10ZDressed to Killhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/04/dressed-to-kill-palma-dvd
(Brian De Palma, 1980, Arrow, 18)<p>Of the generation of confident, bearded, cine-literate film-school graduates dubbed the Movie Brats who set out to take over Hollywood in the 1970s (Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese, Milius, Lucas et al), none was more technically accomplished or referential than Brian De Palma. His&nbsp; work has been prolific and uneven, with mainstream successes like <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/movie/78761/untouchables" title=""><em>The&nbsp;Untouchables</em></a> (1987) and <em>Mission: Impossible </em>(1996), and mainstream failures, most notably <em>The Bonfire of the Vanities </em>(1990). His best films were made between his version of Stephen King's <em>Carrie</em> (1976) and the Vietnam-set <em>Casualties of War</em> (1989). His most daring films are two brilliant thrillers – <em>Dressed to Kill </em>(1980) and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jun/09/blow-out-classic-dvd-review" title=""><em>Blow Out</em></a> (1981).</p><p>The <em>Blow Out </em>DVD appeared earlier this year. <em>Dressed to Kill</em>, his masterly homage to <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/movie/34630/psycho" title=""><em>Psycho</em></a> (with major references to <em>Vertigo</em> and <em>North By Northwest</em>), is out this week accompanied by revealing interviews with De Palma, his producer and stars. This ingenious erotic thriller full of unexpected shocks is best seen with no foreknowledge and even better at a second viewing. Angie Dickinson gives her finest performance as a frustrated middle-class wife and mother, Michael Caine plays her sympathetic shrink, Nancy Allen is a call girl who witnesses an appalling murder, and Dennis Franz is a cynical homicide cop. There's a brilliantly sustained eight-minute sequence of a pick-up at New York's Metropolitan Museum with no dialogue but with a Bernard Herrmann-type <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/mar/18/features.musicmonthly14" title="">score</a> by Pino Donaggio, who began his movie career composing the music for Nic Roeg's <em>Don't Look Now</em> in 1973.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/04/dressed-to-kill-palma-dvd">Continue reading...</a>DVD and video reviewsFilmThrillerDramaCultureMichael CaineBrian de PalmaSat, 03 Aug 2013 23:04:03 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/04/dressed-to-kill-palma-dvdPhotograph: Allstar/Cinetext/CINEMA 77Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill: 'her finest performance'. Photograph: AllstarPhotograph: Allstar/Cinetext/CINEMA 77Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill: 'her finest performance'. Photograph: AllstarPhilip French2013-08-03T23:04:03ZNowhere to Gohttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jan/20/nowhere-to-go-philip-french-classic-dvd
(Seth Holt, 1958, StudioCanal, PG)<p>In 1956 Sir Michael Balcon appointed the <em>Observer's</em> energetic 29-year-old theatre critic, Kenneth Tynan, as Ealing Studios' script editor at a handsome £2,000 a year. His job was to bring in new writers, actors and ideas. Little came of this. Tynan suggested some interesting projects, all passed on to other studios. He wrote a brilliant six-page letter to Balcon about what was wrong with the unadventurous way he ran Ealing that was probably never posted, and he co-scripted the tough, low-budget thriller <em>Nowhere to Go</em>, the studio's penultimate production.</p><p>Tynan's collaborator on <em>Nowhere to Go</em> was Seth Holt, veteran Ealing editor and producer who was determined his directorial debut should be "the least Ealing film ever made". A realistic noir thriller in an American tradition that was then coming to an end, it has none of Ealing's Little Englishness, respect for authority or sense of community. Its plot turns on a violent Canadian charmer (George Nader) robbing a wealthy woman (silent Hollywood star Bessie Love) of her valuable coin collection, going to jail, being sprung by his devious partner in crime and going on the run.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jan/20/nowhere-to-go-philip-french-classic-dvd">Continue reading...</a>DVD and video reviewsThrillerFilmCultureSun, 20 Jan 2013 00:01:03 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jan/20/nowhere-to-go-philip-french-classic-dvdPhotograph: Bfi/BFIMaggie Smith and George Nader in Seth Holt's British noir thriller, Nowhere to Go. Photograph: BfiPhotograph: Bfi/BFIMaggie Smith and George Nader in Seth Holt's British noir thriller, Nowhere to Go. Photograph: BfiPhilip French2013-01-20T00:01:03ZRailroaded!https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/dec/30/railroaded-french-classic-dvd
(Anthony Mann, 1947, Blue Dolphin, PG)<p>Anthony Mann (1906-67) is best known for 11 major Hollywood westerns made in the 1950s and two European epics (<em>El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire</em>) in the 60s. But in the 40s he directed a succession of noir movies, the second&nbsp;being <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLkTTgd7620" title=""><em>Railroaded</em></a>, made by&nbsp;B-feature specialists PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation), whose shooting schedules were rarely more than a week. Shot in high-contrast black and white, the film&nbsp;begins with an&nbsp;economically staged heist at an illegal gambling joint&nbsp;that goes wrong when a cop is killed and an innocent man is framed for&nbsp;the murder. The handsome hero's&nbsp;a&nbsp;dull guy. More interestingly, the&nbsp;killer (John Ireland) is a brutal fetishist who rubs perfume on his bullets, strokes his gun and abuses his&nbsp;drunken moll. Hardboiled screenwriter John C Higgins wrote five noir movies for Mann.</p><p>This is the first film in a new series, <em>Blue Dolphin Film Noir: America's Dark Side</em>, that appears to be avoiding the usual suspects. Future movies include the virtually unknown <a href="http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0039761/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" title=""><em>Repeat Performance</em></a> (1947) and the classic <a href="http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0042369/?ref_=fn_al_tt_3" title=""><em>DOA</em></a> (1950).</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/dec/30/railroaded-french-classic-dvd">Continue reading...</a>ThrillerDVD and video reviewsFilmCultureSun, 30 Dec 2012 00:06:01 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/dec/30/railroaded-french-classic-dvdPhotograph: THE RONALD GRANT ARCHIVEJane Randolph and John Ireland in Anthony Mann's noir thriller Railroaded! Photograph: Ronald Grant ArchivePhotograph: THE RONALD GRANT ARCHIVEJane Randolph and John Ireland in Anthony Mann's noir thriller Railroaded! Photograph: Ronald Grant ArchivePhilip French2012-12-30T00:06:01ZFarewell, My Lovelyhttps://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/dec/02/farewell-my-lovely-philip-french-classic-dvd
(Dick Richards, 1975, Park Circus, 15)<br /><p>Raymond Chandler's second Philip Marlowe novel has been filmed three times: first in disguise as the 1942 B-movie <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Falcon-Takes-Over-DVD/dp/B0040Y4IEQ" title=""><em>The Falcon Takes Over</em></a>, next as the excellent noir thriller <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Murder-My-Sweet-Dick-Powell/dp/B000244EX8" title=""><em>Murder My Sweet</em></a> (1944) starring Dick Powell, and third as this elegant neo-noir with a perfectly cast <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/oct/26/1" title="">Robert Mitchum</a>, at 58 the oldest actor to play Marlowe. It appeared during a period of nostalgia for the interwar years (along with <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Gatsby-DVD-Robert-Redford/dp/B0000A5BT1/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1354126355&amp;sr=1-1" title=""><em>The Great Gatsby</em></a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sting-Special-DVD-Paul-Newman/dp/B000B73H6Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1354126330&amp;sr=1-1" title=""><em>The Sting</em></a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Way-We-Were-DVD/dp/B0038AL79M/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1354126375&amp;sr=1-1" title=""><em>The Way We Were</em></a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chinatown-Special-Collectors-Jack-Nicholson/dp/B000S3999C/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1354126401&amp;sr=1-1" title=""><em>Chinatown</em></a>) and is set in 1941 during the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. To a bluesy score by David Shire, Marlowe goes down the mean streets of a Los Angeles lit by John A Alonzo to resemble paintings by Edward Hopper. He's searching for Velma, the missing moll of gangster Moose Malloy, and following Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak for the Yankees. He's a weary figure, aware that his chivalric values are becoming unfashionable in a changing world. Character takes precedence over suspense in this elegiac movie.</p><p>Charlotte Rampling is a classy femme fatale; pulp novelist Jim Thompson, enjoying brief recognition in his twilight years, plays her elderly husband; John Ireland and Harry Dean Stanton are splendidly contrasted homicide cops; Sylvia Miles gives an Oscar-winning performance as a boozy old broad. Director Dick Richards was one of the major talents to emerge in the early 1970s, but after three outstanding pictures – the western <em>The Culpepper Cattle Company</em>, the beguiling road movie <em>Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins</em> and <em>Farewell, My Lovely</em> - he faded away.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/dec/02/farewell-my-lovely-philip-french-classic-dvd">Continue reading...</a>ThrillerDVD and video reviewsFilmCultureRaymond ChandlerBooksSun, 02 Dec 2012 00:01:04 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/dec/02/farewell-my-lovely-philip-french-classic-dvdPhotograph: SNAP/REX FEATURESCharlotte Rampling in the 1975 version of Farewell, My Lovely. Photograph: SNAP/REX FEATURESPhotograph: SNAP/REX FEATURESCharlotte Rampling in the 1975 version of Farewell, My Lovely. Photograph: SNAP/REX FEATURESPhilip French2012-12-02T00:01:04Z